Functioning online with touring exhibits of political art and music, to make accessible to the public, academics, students, educators, librarians and artists, a collection that intends to create progressive social change through the increased awareness of societal injustices past, present and future.

Clive Holden – Utopia Suite

U Suite is a collection of short stories and essays, immersive cinema-based installations, media murals, and conversations about the letter U. They work together to make a new kind of book. You can read its chapters in any order you want.

U Suite was launched in 2006 at Images Festival in Toronto and at the Holland Festival/International Film Festival Rotterdam in Amsterdam. It will continue to evolve until 2020, you can watch it grow like a plant, or a child, or the dynamic world around you.

Utopia is no longer a destination, it’s a process, it is movement itself – in the literal sense, as a core formal element of moving image art (to be approached as if in a musical composition, so that all elements, whether visual or audible, are heard) – and in the figurative sense: as in progressive politics, our r/evolutionary mandate, and our legacies of idealism coupled to engines of radical change. Central to this effort is a questioning and exploration of the common idea that formal exploration and political engagement are somehow contradictory: a renewed utopianism asserts that form is politics, there is no separation between the two, and working with them together produces energy, explosive cultural tension and movement forward.

:: You Are Being Remembered ::

A man or boy about Conn’s height and weight in a ski mask and down jacket approached the vice principal and said, Mr. Neil, I have something for you. Then he thrust a knife into him, into his tender lower belly. To be stabbed could be seen as a kind of crude intimacy. Of all places to pierce, the man in the ski mask chose his target carefully. This wound would linger.

Clive Holden, a Toronto-based multi-media artist, is currently working on Utopia Suite, a project to investigate into 21st century views on utopianism in its broadest sense. Utopia Suite has, since 2006, been touring art-galleries through Canada. The project hopes to foment a utopian conversation about the radical, anti-logic of hope, the organic and dynamic structures of nature & art, and the necessity of desire.